Internet social networks have become a significant phenomenon. Social networks allow an internet user to create an account and a user profile, often for free, and interact with other users of the social network. A social network user can gain access to the profile of another user by requesting to add him or her as a friend. Once approved, the “friendship” typically gives both users access to each other's profiles and the content posted on them. Friends' posts may appear as news stories in each other's news feeds, and friends can usually comment on each other's news stories. Social network users typically seek to assemble a group of friends or followers with whom they interact. Often, most information on a user's profile is only accessible to the user's friends.
Social networks are providing users with increasingly sophisticated functionality. Early social networks offered little more than a simple interface for users to communicate and post messages. Now, on many social networks, users may share numerous different types of content and interact with each other's content in a variety of ways. Content shared on a social network may include digital media such as images. Users may assemble albums that include photographs and other content and share their albums with their friends. Because of their collaborative nature, social networks have now become a popular means by which many people share photos and other media content.
In addition, as technology has evolved, social networks have introduced tools for accessing social networking systems from a growing variety of technology platforms. Initially, because most users accessed the Internet exclusively from desktop computers, user interfaces of social networking systems were designed with desktop web browsers in mind. However, the exponential growth of mobile computing has facilitated Internet access from a variety of different devices and platforms. Because each technology platform has different technical capabilities and limitations, interfaces of social networks customized for a particular platform are needed.